On Cats: Funny, Moving Essays and Poems About Felines, Beauty, and Love by Charles Bukowski

“Acclaimed writer Charles Bukowski turns his signature eye on the world of felines. A series of essays and poems all about cats, Bukowski’s classic funny and frank tone becomes, at times, even endearing as he explores and honors the majestic creatures and our relationship with them.” —Bustle

Felines touched a vulnerable spot in the unfathomable soul of Charles Bukowski, the Dirty Old Man of American letters. For the writer, there was something elemental about these inscrutable creatures, whose searing gaze could penetrate deep into our beings. Bukowski considered cats to be forces of nature, elusive emissaries of beauty and love.

Funny and moving, On Cats offers Bukowski’s musings on these beloved animals and their toughness and resiliency. Poignant and free of treacle, On Cats is an illuminating portrait of this one-of-a-kind artist and his unique view of the world, witnessed through his relationship with the animals he considered among his most profound teachers.

"The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you’ll live ten times longer than if you have ten. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever." -Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in 1920 in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier father and a German mother, and brought to the United States at the age of two. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for over fifty years. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp.

Abel Debritto, a former Fulbright scholar and current Marie Curie fellow, works in the digital humanities. He is the author of Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground, and the editor of the Bukowski collections On Writing, On Cats, and On Love.